The power of play: How companies are using gamification to build engagement

Many North American companies are in a funk. It has become difficult to wring more cost savings out of operations and incremental revenues from customers. In a globalized world, just being efficient and having a good product is no longer a winning formula. In some mature sectors like financial services, telecom and IT, the only remaining differentiator may be higher worker productivity and brand loyalty, manifested through the engagement and enthusiasm of customers and employees. This is where Gamification comes in. This approach leverages game design principles and techniques in a business environment to affect behaviour. Many dynamic companies like Microsoft, Commonwealth Bank, Nike and SAP are already using the principles of game playing to improve business and financial performance.

Fundamentally, Gamification looks to turn disengaged individuals into active and productive participants using fun and social competition, instead of binary rewards and punishment. It is about using games within an organizational environment to get a person to experience a brand or change behaviorally, rather than simply hearing a one-off message in a passive way. Regularly living this experience, whether in an on- or off-line environment, can indelibly imprint a memory of the brand promise or the desired change on the person. Gamification works because it gets to the essence of human behaviour, blending behavioural economics, motivational science, and the alignment of individual drives and rewards with corporate goals.

The roots of Gamification can be found in the 40-year-old, $70B-billion video game industry, a sector that knows something about hooking and keeping an individual’s interest and getting him or her to do things he or she may be reluctant to do. Playing games is a natural human activity that traces its roots back to prehistoric times. Hundreds of millions of people regularly play on and offline games around the world including 42% of Americans, 52% of UK residents and 66% of Germans (source: 2011 National Gaming survey). Game playing has been successfully used globally to boost customer acquisition rates, spark internal innovation, improve call centre performance, foster increased collaboration and catalyze long term change.

Below are two examples of how simple Gamification programs has been used effectively:

MicrosoftThe company faced a testing challenge releasing Windows 7 in multiple countries and languages. It had to make sure the dialogue boxes worked well in every language. This manual process required motivated and conscientious testers who could consistently perform a mundane but important task without getting bored. Recognizing the potential of using games to improve their quality-assurance performance, management established a simple competition for employee teams across different geographies. The objective of the game was to find as many errors as possible in the localized dialogue boxes. Interestingly, testers were given no financial rewards. They were motivated by the excitement of finding the most coding errors, being good corporate citizens and being the most successful office on the published leaderboard.

The results were impressive. The employees reviewed approximately 500,000 dialogue boxes, and found hundreds of bugs and errors in the localization that hadn’t been discovered in the original translation. Microsoft is committed to Gamification. According to Ross Smith, director of test, Windows Core Security at Microsoft, “Productivity games and virtual worlds are 21st century business processes, not gimmicks, something we’ve seen for years at Microsoft.”

Commonwealth BankIn 2011, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank developed Investorville, a property-investing game that looked to improve the real estate literacy of potential home buyers. The game featured an online simulator allowing players to dabble in real estate investing without risking their equity. Working with a company that maintains residential property information and economists, the bank created a financial snapshot of every suburban housing market in Australia. By choosing an investor-profile (first time investor, more experienced, etc.), players learn about investment strategies, rental returns, and interest rates.

“Making the leap from owning your own property to buying an investment property can seem quite daunting to a lot of people,” claimed Mark Murray, general manager of Commonwealth Bank Consumer Marketing. “Investorville helps to break down common misconceptions and show the practicalities of property investment. The really beneficial part of Investorville is that users can, in the true sense of the term, try before they buy.” According to a September 2012 report from InvestorDaily, the Investorville game generated about 600 loans within one year of launch, behind an investment of around $400,000.

As the above cases illustrate, game playing has the potential to change the nature of work and customer engagement. Exploring this brave new world, however, is not for the impatient or unprepared. Introducing game playing into a company’s fabric obliges senior managers to first align around their core business objectives & metrics and then study how other organizations have successfully (and unsuccessfully) implemented Gamification.

Mitchell Osak is managing director of Quanta Consulting Inc. Quanta has delivered a variety of strategy and organizational transformation consulting and educational solutions to global Fortune 1000 organizations. Mitchell can be reached at mosak@quantaconsulting.com

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